Posted
by
timothy
on Thursday September 01, 2011 @02:22PM
from the that-was-ithen-this-is-inow dept.

An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from Edible Apple: "Apple didn't release the first tablet computer or even come up with the idea for tablet computing itself. If anything, Microsoft, and Bill Gates in particular, were championing tablet computers years before the iPad was released. In this video clip from the first All Things D conference in 2003, former Apple CEO Steve Jobs explains to Walt Mossberg why Apple, at the time, wasn't keen on tablets and more specifically, why Jobs felt that stylus computing and handwriting recognition were inherent failures."

What mistake? Handwriting recognition at the time sucked. Hell, it still sucks. Tablets were emphasizing writing stuff rather than typing stuff.

Note the iPad uses a touch-screen keyboard, not handwriting. I don't really see an inconsistency with what Jobs said then and what Apple is building now - and that's coming from a guy who is anything but an Apple fan.

Be fair. It's not because Apple magically did something nobody else had thought of to make tablets suddenly the bee's knees. Tablets still aren't that great (although I've got a 2nd-hand nook color I rooted and enjoy fooling around with). The ipad succeeded because... drumroll... it was made by Apple.

I am fully of the opinion that right now, Apple could announce today a slick white electronic toothpick for $300, and there'd be lines outside apple stores nationwide tomorrow morning demanding the new iPic. Ap

Jealousy of Apple's success(es) will get you nowhere. I don't have an iPad. I do have an iPhone. I do like Apple products. If your argument had any merit both you and I would each have an iPad because... drumroll... it is made by Apple.

I am fully of the opinion that right now, Apple could announce today a slick white electronic toothpick for $300, and there'd be lines outside apple stores nationwide tomorrow morning demanding the new iPic.

I just called my Apple Store, and they say they've never heard of the iPic! Where do I have to go to get one? Where did you get yours? Are they on eBay yet? Will they come in black?

Do you really think people would keep shelling out money for things that don't work and don't fulfil their requirements? People do buy Apple products because they're Apple products, but that choice is based on the fact that their previous experience with Apple products has been good. The concept is known as trust - presuming that previous experience will continue. If Apple started churning out rubbish products that didn't fulfil peoples needs and expectations, then they might last one generation, but the

I guess you don't remember all of the people who claimed it would fail. There was no expectation of success, there was not a huge consumer rush for it initially.

The reason it took off was because it actually worked as well as they said it would, they shipped with something like 3k apps (and remember each and every one of those apps was only ever tested on the iPad simulator!!!) and it was HALF the price everyone (well, except for me, I called t

Apple has "fans" for a reason, but fans aren't simply enough to keep a business profitable and growing unless it is doing great things and making more fans. Your theory fails this test.

The iPad succeeded by all accounts b/c it was a great piece of hardware (both aesthetically and functionally) coupled with a user friendly UI all at a reasonable price. No one has competed with that yet on all counts (though some have gotten 2 out of 3 with Android).

I have to disagree. The iPad had no rival at launch. Other companies made tablets that looked just like notebook computers in size and weight, and tried to run Windows as a tablet OS. The other popular tablet-like device (the Kindle) is similarly portable, and very cheap.

Windows needs a keyboard - that's why netbooks were so hot. Apple's MacOS would make a similarly atrocious tablet. The iOS made a very nice tablet. The others have caught on and sell non-Windows devices, but they are a year or so behind App

I'd say the success is because it's smaller than a netbook but still has wireless access.

That was the major failing of early tablet computers. They didn't have any wireless network access, so you had to at some point perform a resync with your network server or PC. Tablets looked great with the stylus - seemed perfect for artists to do Photoshop. But they didn't have enough memory space for editing large images. They also seemed great for doctors, ending the need for paper clipboards. But if a doctor needed

Apple pretending that they had no intention to allow apps on the early iPhone was obviously misdirection in retrospect. At the time they were having enough trouble making the software work at all without crashing, and they didn't want developers/users to avoid it while waiting for the bright app future. Sort of a counter to the Osborne Effect.

Apple pretending that they had no intention to allow apps on the early iPhone was obviously misdirection in retrospect. At the time they were having enough trouble making the software work at all without crashing, and they didn't want developers/users to avoid it while waiting for the bright app future. Sort of a counter to the Osborne Effect.

Funny, but back in the iOS 1.x days (when rhe only apps were webapps), the jailbreakers had apps, by the dozen. Installer.app was the way (it died out and Cydia came i

Unless you expected them to code in-house apps in old fashion assembly, they needed an SDK from the start to make their apps. That does not mean they ever planned to make the SDK public.

There is no direct evidence of either fact (it being planned or it never crossing his mind) but we can actually look at Apple's behavioral approach to iDevices. The iPod Nano and Video had been running some apps for years, and Apple never made this SDK widely available (they did allow certain entities like Square Enix to mak

This myth has been propagated widely, but I don't think it holds water. One thing that Apple does well is ship a product that performs a limited number of tasks well, not a product that is buzzword compliant. Features are added later. Remember that Mac OS was originally flat file? It is widely known that an iPad can't play flash.

The web-app never made sense to me because how could Apple hope to differentiate the product? How could they keep people from buying the competition. Of course, as the lack o

We all remember what Steve Jobs was saying that Apple had "no plans at the current time to make a tablet." We are now 9 years in the future so it is hardly "the current time" that he was referring to. I know it is fashionable here on Slashdot to make fun of Apple but this time there is nothing to laugh at. He was talking about how tablets suck, not that people won't by them, and quite frankly I can only agree with him.

How the hell is he being made fun of? Clearly he is talking about how tablets at that time were terrible. The cult of Steve is so powerful that you're seeing oppression and mocking where there is none. Relax Francis, no one is taking your precious iphone away.

but they still are terrible at least for majority of purposes they are so hyped to be used for. There are few uses for which they are good for and this has to be acknowledged but that is it. Unless a major breakthrough in IO is achieved I do not see how they go beyond all the limited entertainment device.

We also know that Apple has some experience in trying to pioneer handwriting technology (the Apple Newton, I think it was) and are therefore well acquainted with the challenges involved (power requirements, error rates, CPU overheads, etc). That knowledge-base has existed for Apple for a long time now. Yes, technology has progressed, but if you can squeeze N% more out of a modern CPU for the same power input then Apple can easily run the numbers to see if N% is enough.

This doesn't mean Apple will always be right. Hell, the fact that they pushed the Newton and the Lisa out into the marketplace before the products were useful is evidence that they can be mistaken. What it does mean is that they've good cause to be cautious and they've actual real-world data to work from. They may be reading the numbers wrong, but I'm confident that they're actually taking the time to read them.

(Compare that to Bill Gates' notion that the Internet was a fad. He had no experience in networking at all, he had no numbers to crunch, he made an arrogant remark without basis and it was obvious at the time that that was what it was. Networking had been emerging for longer than he'd been in computing and was on an exponential growth curve. By the time Microsoft was ready to deal with IPv4, next-generation technologies were already being developed because the sustained demand was too great. IPv6 stacks were actually being released for Windows before Microsoft's IPv4 stack was integrated - and that's even after Microsoft took most of their network code from the BSD tapes.)

By the time Microsoft was ready to deal with IPv4, next-generation technologies were already being developed because the sustained demand was too great. IPv6 stacks were actually being released for Windows before Microsoft's IPv4 stack was integrated - and that's even after Microsoft took most of their network code from the BSD tapes.

I'm going to have to say you're wrong.

Windows 95, released in August 1995, integrated an IPv4 stack. The first IPv6 RFC, RFC1883 [ietf.org], was posted in December 1995. It was replaced in December 1998 with RFC2460 [ietf.org].

Bill Gates didn't say the Internet as in networking was a fad, he said that he thought that the web was a fad. So all that stuff about IPv4 is kind of irrelevant.

Actually, researching this, it appears he didn't say that either. But it's well known that Microsoft was slow to create a web browser, and wound up buying one from another company to compete with Netscape. So even if he didn't say it, the company still acted like they thought it was a fad. And, hell, in 1994, can you really blame them?

well said. Processors at that time were not up to the performance and power usage they needed to be and x86 still isn't so as you stated, this is now and that was then. He at least was smart enough to know that fitting OSX on the iPad or iPhone was not a smart move. Unlike some other company who still wants their bloated desktop OS on their phones and tablets.

In terms of design and development they designed an iPad first but when they realized they had the neccesary components for a smart phone, they went to work on the iPhone instead. I can only surmise that cost and technology were factors. See people would pay a lot for a smart phone and with AT&T sudsidies Apple could fund more R&D to get tablet technologies cheaper like the 10" screen in 2007 would have insanely expensive compared to a 4" touchscreen.

Tablets still fail as computers, and I don't think Jobs' ideas about them have changed. But there are a lot of people who can afford $500 as their "third" computer (or now "second" with laptops being powerful enough to be a primary). And Jobs said there was a market for that, it's just a lot bigger than it was 8 years ago.

There's a reason there isn't a keyboard accessory sold by Apple. If you want a keyboard, and you're going to type so much you need one, get a MacBook. Unfortunately, I think that's holding back the desire to get a pressure sensitive stylus added to the interface options on the iPad (well, that and probably a ton of patents held by Wacom), which would expand the usability of a tablet quite a bit.

Fail as computers? It might not be the best word processor, but with a keyboard it could be fine. I don't know since I haven't tried. But 'fail' is definitely too strong a word.

It has a decent web browser (other than no flash!), great games, musical instruments, is a great ebook/comic book reader, has a DAW controller, has GPS, has a constellation map, email, and innumerable utilities for countless professions.

Then tell me how I ordered an Apple Ipad keyboard
with my pad on the apple web sight. Its got the same white apple keys, in the same size as does the
Imac keyboard, just with the right hand junk pads missing. I think you got your facts a bit off.

That's only true if you see computers as an end unto themselves rather than as a means to an end. Take a random person off the street, ask them what they use a computer for. What'll they say ? Email, the web, chatting, watching video, listening to music, managing their pictures, playing games, etc. iPads cover a great deal of what regular people use their computer for and do it in an extremely user friendly way, how's that failing as a computer ?

Well my 3rd gen iPod's battery lasted about a year and a few months before I couldn't get more than 30-45 minutes on a charge, just long enough to be out of warranty of course, and of course I didn't buy Applecare so that meant I had to hand over $99 to Apple and wait 3 months for them to send it off to replace it. Of course, I purchased a 3rd party battery online for all of $10 dollars and replaced it myself in a whopping 3 minutes, the majority of which was spent wrestling the case apart since they make

There aren't to many user replaceable parts on laptops, also the new iPads have less parts that will fail.I remember it was a big thing when Intel started offered motherboards where you can swap out the CPU and put a new one in. Everyone was yea this is way cool... However what happened was people got the mother board and then got the fastest CPU it could support. If you wanted to upgrade your CPU you needed to upgrade your motherboard because it was maxed out.

I got an iPhone 3G when they first came out. I still use it every day. It has been dropped onto concrete, drowned, and never once has had a girly case protecting it.

the back is scratched up but you can read all the labels, with this last dunking in water it has finally started to corrode the sim card socket. However it works just fine, battery life is still good for 2-3 days for "MY" usage.

by products that are designed to live a long time to begin with and they have a good chance of living twice as long

Have also replaced hard drives in at least 3 different types of Mac (iBook, Powerbook 12", Macbook Pro), and the optical drive (with a generic whitebox DVD burner) in a 12" Powerbook.

The i5 and i7's in the new iMacs are socketed, the GPU is on a separate board, the HD and optical drive are SATA, Apple also released a firmware update for the MBP to ensure stable SATA3 6GB/s speed even though they don't personally ship any SATA3 parts after homebrew

And throwing misdirections to lull the competition into complacency also helps. At this Jobs have been a master. It is almost as if one can make the claim that the more Jobs decried something, the closer Apple was to launch a product in that segment.

This was the guy who was denying there was an iPhone a month before it came out. I'm not saying he didn't change his mind but if they did have a proto iPad at the time he sure wouldn't have spilled the beans to Mossberg.

the phone was. when Apple skipped tablets and turned phones into computers (i mean, when it decided Palm's ideas could be slightly improved and packaged in boner-inducing ways), it dived right in.

and email started to decline and texting grew. because texting is just email you can tolerate to write at 2 cps, and was already on phones.

and, interestingly, phone calls have died as well. because the phone-computer idea wasn't about calling people, it was about having that whole package of computing and connectivity in one pocket instead of two or three.

then, once the small-form-factor touchscreen interface device got popular, it was a natural transform to pull on its edges to make it, simply, a bigger version of the same thing. hence we're back to tablets. which aren't notebooks without keyboards; they're smartphones with extra spatial extent.

and i doubt that jobs saw this coming in 2003. all he saw was that tabletized notebooks were bollocks. which they were.

We only have Jobs word for that (unless there have been some named Apple engineer that have come out and confirmed it), and the guy is a savant spin doctor. One year he claims people do not read, the next Apple launch ebooks for iphone. And never do we see the guy confess to a mea culpa or anything even close to that. It was almost as if the more Jobs decried something, the more likely it was that Apple had some project in the lab that was about to launch that aimed directly at that topic.

The gp was arguing that email volumes were declining, which simply isn't the case. Also, even if we toss out those 78%, email still beats texting. And if we consider that there's no 140-character limit in email, in terms of the volume of actual content, email will always be #1.

the phone was. when Apple skipped tablets and turned phones into computers (i mean, when it decided Palm's ideas could be slightly improved and packaged in boner-inducing ways), it dived right in.

Eh? Pretty much everyone knew PDAs and phones were going to converge. A lot of geeks didn't like it since PDAs were "their" toy while phones were something the masses used. But once the Blackberry took off it was pretty clear that they would converge. The only question was whe

Apple was not the one who "turned phones into computers". That was either Palm, or possibly Symbian or WinMo, depending on which way you look at it - but either way, years before. And people who actually needed a pocket computer were using them all the way back then. It's just that not so many people did.

Apple was the one who turned phones in "infotainment" devices. Not a computer - not what we normally understand by "computer" - but a locked-down device with tightly controlled user experience even for thir

Get your facts straight. Misc comments on styluses and handwriting aside, Apple fellow Alan Kay came up with the first known concept design for the tablet back in the 1960's with the Dynabook. At the time he was working for Xerox PARC, the facility's researchers came up with the first Windowed Graphical User Interface and the first Ethernet controllers.
Granted Apple ripped them off mercilessly for the original Mac design, but Xerox signed a released that allowed them to have it. Go figure. Ironically

I don't think anyone will diagree that the Dynabook was the first Tablet, but it was produced by Kay while at Xerox not Apple. Kay worked for Apple for a little more than 10 years...during that time Jobs was not at the company and Kay was let go when Jobs returned and closed the R&D dept. Kay was part of. I wouldn't give credit to Apple for pioneering just innovating into something consumers wanted to buy thanks in part to the iPhone.

Microsoft doesn't deserve much credit, either. Microsoft was thought to be late to the tablet party. Conceptually, the credit should go to Alan Kay for the "Dynabook." The 1989 GRiDpad was the first real product, and there was an immense amount of buzz around GO! Computing's 1992 PenPoint. Microsoft really just genned up "Windows for Pen Computing" as a sort of me-too response to PenPoint. Wang Labs had something called "Guide" (after the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) which got lost in the collapse of the company; the people working on it went on to found a company called, if memory serves me, Arthur Dent, but I don't know what happened to it.

Apple deserves credit for the iPad in much the same way as it deserves credit for the GUI... and Edison deserves credit for the electric light, and the Wright Brothers deserve credit for the airplane. None of them really "invented" these things, none of them were really the first, and most of the technology was in the air waiting to be commercialized. But in each case they were the first to make it to market with something that didn't suck--with a finished, usable, "perfected"--to use an old-fashioned word--product.

Microsoft and Gates' vision of tablet computing back then was a full desktop operating system with a stylus and handwriting recognition.

Steve Jobs pointed out in 2003 that even done very, very well, handwriting recognition still sucks.

The iPhone, a mini tablet released in 2007, had an operating system built ground up with a touch interface (no stylus), and when it came to text input it popped up an on-screen keyboard (no handwriting recognition).

The article closes with Jobs acknowledging that tablets would be good for reading articles (I saw a project on hack-a-day where someone built an iPad bracket into their kitchen so they could read recipes), and joking that tablets are a niche market.

Microsoft's tablet efforts in 2003 were worse than niche market, they were failures. Apple blew the market wide open by not following the same path.

Bingo. Rather than just port over their desktop OS (hello, Microsoft), Jobs waited until they had developed something that actually worked on a tablet. And yes, I did own a Windows tablet...and no, I don't miss it.

They're still failures. Handwriting is still an inferior input mechanism to keyboards, and tablets still cannot replace notebooks or desktops for many purposes. The limitations of the tablet format haven't changed. What has changed is the size of the market for a limited function device. It's not just rich guys who have 2 or 3 computers now.

That's true in most situations, but I strongly feel that it's wrong for note-taking. I've been a grad student for a while -- I've taken a lot of classes. And I've tried the "type notes" thing on a few occasions, and never really liked it. Why? Because while the keyboard is the best device out there at generating text, there's a crapload of stuff that is useful to put into notes that isn't text. A keyboard is awful at diagrams. (Unless you've go

What has changed is the size of the market for a limited function device. It's not just rich guys who have 2 or 3 computers now.

I think Apple is gambling on iPhones/iPads being at least the second computer device people own and eventually their first. Lots of people don't want a computer they want the internet or IM or games. Making the computer invisible as just a means to an end, that's the iPad.

The real failure of tablet computers was not as simple as "hurr durr they used a stylus." Desktop OSes are still designed for computers with keyboards; the mouse is only useful for launching programs and using files created by others. When it comes to writing an email, chatting, etc., the keyboard is still king; Steve Jobs was right on, and the truth of his statements has not changed. Modern tablets are winning because they run software that was designed to be far more graphical and "consumption oriented" -- a physical keyboard is not terribly important, and the software keyboard that is available is "good enough" for what people use their tablets for.

Microsoft used a stylus because the OS (and all the apps) demanded it: there are too many small controls to manipulate with fingers. The stylus included with every TabletPC was (literally) a pointer to the actual problem.

By the same token, the lack of a stylus on the iPad (and devices based on its design) points out the fact that they are (at best) less-than-optimal for most content-creation tasks. For example, although I really like Apple and iOS, a slate-format TabletPC is a far better tool for drawing

No MS used a stylus because they never really thought beyond the idea of running Windows on a tablet. They never thought to optimize a tablet for touch. To be fair, Apple didn't solve this problem. They sidestepped the problem by using multi-touch and using a completely different model for UI.

Well MS only thought about designing a tablet to run Windows. That was the total sum of their design. Apple did not design the iPad to merely run OS X. Apple actually thought about what design choices would be required to use all touch interfaces. As such iOS is different than OS X. Windows Tablet edition was generic Windows with a few tweaks.

Do you think the Windows Tablet edition of XP would have dominated the market had they made their GUI better? The tablets of the era needed a stylus because every tablet I ever saw was running a high resolution screen with the stock GUI, meaning teeny-tiny little "dropdown" buttons, scroll bars, etc. But they could run any Windows program without modification. They didn't sell. Even if the OS had been fully optimized for tablets (it never was,) nobody cared that they could run a teeny-tiny screen versio

There was nothing particularly new or revolutionary about the iPad except one thing: It was the first device that attempted to scale a touch-oriented mobile phone OS up to a larger screen, instead of shoehorning a desktop OS into a smaller device. It helped Apple that they already had a good touchscreen-oriented phone OS, but Android transitioned to tablets easily too.

The HP TouchPad would have done well if WebOS weren't already dying a s

The problem is that the "stylus" and the "keyboard" are two different markets, and you can't serve both of them properly.

I come from the art community, one of the bitching points about the iPad is that the capacitive screen makes it completely unusable for drawing any more fine than fingerpainting.

The flip side is that the on-screen keyboard eats too much of the screen real estate. So the tablet is NOT a desktop replacement, but there is no reason why it can't do either of these better. The iPad can be used

The only catch is that you then need software that fully supports such transformations. If you can plug a mouse (or a trackpad) and a keyboard to your tablet, it suddenly stops being a tablet - and touch UI becomes extremely uncomfortable and just gets in the way. It should be able to transform to a more traditional desktop-like (or at least Unity-like) thingy. Win8 will bring that to the table - and I suspect that other tablet OSes will scramble to follow.

To say Apple didnt invent the tablet and then point to Microsoft seems indifference to that toy that Apple released so long ago called the Newton... before Palm..

That "toy", like the later "toy" (the iPad), launched entire new breeds of products. So apparently, you are in the minority in dismissing those groundbreaking products (yes there were other "tablets" before the iPad; but none were more than annoyingly cringeworthy).
But of course, like all haters, you are too pusillanimous to subject your Karma to the drubbing it so richly deserves.

I have a Newton - the second generation. I used the last generation as well. Groundbreaking? Yes. Toys? Also yes - because they always seem to be more promise than actualization, but they were fun to play with. The last generation Newt came out at the same time the PalmPilot was taking hold and WinCE (the best acronym I've seen in a long time) was coming out with clamshells and handhelds. It had a lot more promise than the WinCE machines, but the PalmPilot really showed the way for what a PDA should be.

You're off by a few years, PCs started becoming readily available and ubiquitous by about 1998-99. Not only did they appear in more homes but more and more businesses. By 2003 acceleration had begun to slow since the market was fairly well saturated. It wasn't price that allowed households to have secondary machines but saturation. It's not splurging when the needs increase to demand a second or third machine. Families grow and a single machine no longer suits everyone's needs. Businesses expand or just rep